What begin as a sunny day on the lake with friends searching for a meteorite, quickly turned into a full on fossil frenzy for Jon Ganshorn and his six-year-old daughter Lily.

Lily quickly lost interest in the meteorite hunt and decided her time was better spent getting her dad to break apart some of the soft shale rocks that litter the area around Lake Diefenbaker.

The ammonite fossil that started it all. Jon Ganshorn displays the still muddy first fossil his daughter Lily discovered this summer at Lake Diefenbaker. (Supplied/ Jon Ganshorn)

“She was pointing at the rocks she wanted me to pick up and break,” Ganshorn remembers laughing. “We crack open this one rock and right in the centre it just started to shine — there was this phosphorescent look to it. We knew right away we found something pretty cool.”

That first fossil, which Lily still considers her favourite, turned out to be a piece of ammonite — a type of extinct marine mollusk.

Figuring that to be a good find for the day the group headed home, but budding paleontologist Lily couldn’t get enough of the fossils, so she and Ganshorn, whose family has been summering at Lake Diefenbaker for the past 20 years, ended up making trip after trip to the area.

And those trips proved quite productive. The pair found quite a few more ammonite fragments, clusters of seashells and a few that looked like they might be fossilized dragonflies.

“As soon as she found it she was in her element. We would go down once a day and Lily would be all excited she would point to the different rocks and we’d go down and break rocks and find tons of these fossils. Of course, Dad has to carry these things all up the sand dunes — I was definitely getting my workout for the day.”

Curious about exactly what they were finding, Ganshorn sent some photos to the university in hopes they would be able to identify the creatures. The photos ended up on the desk of Meagan Gilbert, a PhD student studying paleontology.

Gilbert was able to confirm some of the fossils to be ammonites, others were found to be a different types of mollusk shells. The only thing that she hasn’t been able to identify were the fossils Ganshorn said looked like dragonflies, explaining there simply isn’t enough information to identify those fossils using only a photograph.

One of Lily Ganshorn’s fossil finds included this array of mollusk shells. (Supplied/ Jon Ganshorn)

Because all of the finds were quite common to the area, Lily was able to keep her new treasures, but Gilbert warns that amateur fossil hunters shouldn’t expect to be able to simply take home their finds.

“In Saskatchewan we have something called the Heritage Property Act, which protects all fossils … but things like ammonites and shells are pretty common so no one is really going to get upset about it. But technically, it is something that is legislated.”

Lake Diefenbaker sits within what is known as the Bearpaw Formation, an area that covers northern Montana, southern Saskatchewan and up into central Alberta. The area is known for it’s high concentration of ammonite fossils as it used to be part of an inland sea during the Cretaceous period. Gilbert says ammonite fossils are so common they are actually used in biostratigraphy to date help date other fossils, although she does note that finding intact, undamaged ammonites is quite rare.

“It’s not uncommon that I get photos from people finding stuff in the Lake Diefenbaker area,” she explains. “These finds were all pretty regular routine stuff, but it’s really great that people have an interest and go out and find this kind of stuff and get other people excited and fired up about it because you need people to be interested in it — people should be interested in it.”

And Lily is definitely interested, so much so that she has insisted on keeping the location of their finds a secret so the newly formed Dinosaur Hunter Gang — a club she started with her cousins — can continue their excavations into next summer as well.

Ganshorn says everyone he’s dealt with at the university has been very helpful answering all of their questions and says they have even been joking about him having a future U of S paleontology student on his hands.

Jon Ganshorn, his daughter Lily (second from right) and the rest of the Dinosaur Hunter Gang show off one of the fossils they discovered at Lake Diefenbaker this summer (Supplied/ Jon Ganshorn)

While it will be quite a few years before Lily decides if she wants to pursue a career in paleontology, she does have big plans for the Dinosaur Hunter Gang in the summer of 2018.

“Since this find has become quite the thing, we’ve had a couple donations. One person had an old quad and another person with a trailer so we are already starting to talk about the 2018 expeditions,” Ganshorn says. “I’ll at least have a quad I can drag all the fossils out with and tow the kids around and find some new areas. It will be fun.”

Ganshorn says Lily has always been an avid rock collector, so he is very glad to have extra space in his rock garden to display all her discoveries. Although she is not only a collector, but also a fairly successful promoter of paleontology and the Dinosaur Hunter Gang, getting her friends at school excited about fossils and the idea of maybe finding their own.

With so many kids interested in joining, Ganshorn says he really wants to focus on teaching them more about the fossils, how they are made and where they come from.

“Not only are we finding these things, but (the kids) are also learning about the dinosaurs and the time periods and all these different things … The next step is going to her school and bringing the fossils in,” he finishes.

“It would be really cool for those kids who are into dinosaurs as well to say ‘Here have your own dinosaur.’ ”

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